Will You Be My Advisor?

By Cliff Korn, BS, LMT, NCTMB

I am going to blatantly steal an idea that Massage Today's publisher, Don Petersen, printed in our sister publication, Dynamic Chiropractic, a few months ago. He asked for members of the chiropractic profession to volunteer to be his "chiropractic advisors." It sounded like a good idea, and so I'm asking the massage profession to do the same.

Simply put, I would like to know if you would be willing to be my "massage therapy advisors." I know how busy you are, so I would make sure to respect your time; chances are, I'd probably consult with you no more than six to eight times a year - and even then, it would almost always be by e-mail.

The experiences you have as a massage therapist, seeing clients, and making the benefits of our profession known throughout your community, are very important to me.

You can provide additional insight on how Massage Today can best serve our profession and, in turn, help best serve your clients. Your feedback will help point Massage Today in the direction you think it should go as we look to utilize MT, MassageToday.com and our online "To Your Health" newsletter (and any other great ideas you come up with) in ways that will best benefit the profession.

Our ultimate goal is to meet your needs in the areas where we can make a difference. Understanding your needs and how best to meet them is almost impossible unless you have direct input. You know what is most important to you; I want to hear what you have to say.

As you already know, more than 80,000 massage therapists, vendors, students and other health care providers who practice massage are reading this article. That's a pretty big audience, and it takes a pretty sophisticated communications system to get in touch with all of them. The good thing is, such a system is already in place - e-mail - which allows us to get in touch virtually any time, from virtually anywhere. That is one of the reasons I'd like my advisors to speak with me by e-mail. It also ensures that only the massage therapists who want to be my advisors are contacted.

Over the past five years, we've collected the e-mail addresses of tens of thousands of massage therapists. In the coming months, we will send e-mail to our prospective massage advisors to find out how many would like to participate. To keep your time commitment at a minimum, this e-mail will include a link to a form, which will give you the ability to provide short responses to questions, or to just click on your choice from a list of possible answers. It will rarely require more than three or four minutes of your time.

You can confirm if you want to be (or remain) one of my advisors with each advisory e-mail. If you do, simply provide your opinion on the topics included in the e-mail. If at any time you no longer want to be an advisor, there will always be an opt-out feature that you can use to tell us.

If you would like to be one of my advisors, would you please send me an e-mail letting me know that you would be willing to share your opinion with me? You can e-mail me at the following address, which we've set up specifically for this purpose:
cliffkornmassagetoday.com.

Please know that your personal opinions will not be published or shared outside of our company. It is our intention to better understand your needs and what issues we should be involved with and/or encourage others to pursue in order to help meet those needs.

Thank you so much for considering being my massage advisor. Your thoughts are very important to me. They will help shape what we do, what we support, and where we focus our efforts for you, your practice and our profession.

Thanks for listening!

Massage Today encourages letters to the editor to discuss matters related to the publication's content. Letters may be published in a future issue or online. Please send all correspondence by e-mail to
clifflmtmpamedia.com or by regular mail to:

Massage Today P.O. Box 4139 Huntington Beach, CA 92605

Former editor of Massage Today, Cliff is owner of Windham Health Center Neuromuscular Therapy LLC. He is nationally certified in therapeutic massage & bodywork and is licensed as a massage therapist by the states of New Hampshire and Florida. Cliff is a member of the International Association of Healthcare Practitioners; a professional member and past president of the New Hampshire chapter of the American Massage Therapy Association; a certified member of the Associated Bodywork & Massage Professionals, Inc.; and a past chairman of the board of directors of the National Certification Board for Therapeutic Massage & Bodywork.

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